ACTA : April writes to the ITRE and JURI committees of the European Parliament

On December 7th, 2011, April sent two letters to ITRE (Industry, Research and Energy) and LIBE (Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs) Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) to make them aware about the dangers of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA[6]) and to ask them to reject this agreement.

Here is the content of these letters:

Dear Members of the LIBE Committee of the European Parliament,

You will have to express yourselves about the "Anti-Counterfeiting" Trade Agreement (ACTA) in the upcoming weeks. This international agreement presents many threats for the community of free software authors, users and companies. For years, April has been stating1 its concerns regarding this agreement.

If many clauses directly toxic to free software have been rephrased to give the text a more innocuous appearance, the agreement moved to vote avoids every improvement about the status of Digital Rights Management devices (DRM)2 in international law.

Indeed, the text mentions in a non-restrictive paragraph3 that bypassing these "digital cuffs" must be forbidden by law. This would lead to unacceptable restrictions of one's freedom, and results in stopping citizens from doing what they want with products they bought for themselves. This interference in privacy and this control issues are unjustifiable breaches to the right to privacy and to individual rights. It also restricts everyone's right to choose which tools to use, favouring the technological lock-in against which European Institutions have already spoken many times4. Standing under the dependence of some players can only increase the censorship risk.

Similarly, the criminal sanctions against technical intermediaries proposed in the text represents a serious danger to freedoms. The new penal sanctions that ACTA would create would indeed lead to surveillance and censorship of online communications, which amounts to an unacceptable limitation to freedom of speech. Whereas the European Parliament spoke many times in favour of fundamental freedom on the Internet, ACTA would undermine these essential democratic principles.

Finally, the idea of introducing criminal sanctions by means of a trade agreement negotiated without any democratic control poses a serious issue about abiding to institutions and basic rights.

That is why April is calling you to reject this agreement.

Letter to the Members of the ITRE Committee of the European Parliament:

Dear Members of the ITRE Committee of the European Parliament,

You will have to express yourselves about the "Anti-Counterfeiting" Trade Agreement (ACTA) during the upcoming weeks. This international agreement presents many threats for the community of free software authors, users and companies. For years, April has been stating5 its concerns regarding this agreement.

If many clauses directly toxic to free software have been rephrased to give it a more innocuous appearance, the agreement moved to vote avoids every improvement about the status of Digital Rights Management devices (DRM)6 in international law.

Indeed, the text mentions in a non-restrictive paragraph7 that bypassing these "digital cuffs" must be forbidden by the law, even though bypassing might be necessary to ensure interoperability and the possibility for software to exchange information and to mutually use the exchanged information. Interoperability is crucial for innovation and for Free Software actors: it ensure the networking with existing solutions, including proprietary ones, and the possibility to develop new compatible solutions.

The legal uncertainty that ACTA is pushing on Free Software, and
more generally on the computing world, will also have some
harmful consequences on innovation in this area. The Free Software ecosystem is especially sensitive to these legal risks. An adoption of this agreement by European
institutions will only impede the emergence of next
technological revolutions in Europe and put a disadvantage on
companies and on the European economy within the international market.
Free Software constitutes an important and growing potential, as
demonstrated the study we did with the Harris Interactive
Institute and Tarsus, and it participates in an essential way
to the innovation of the information: in France, 90% of companies
innovating in this area have done so using Free Software8.
Limiting innovation by banning the possibility to develop new solutions and/or new products or services, is in substance what ACTA is offering.

Finally, the current draft agreement provides for the introduction of criminal sanctions for all those "aiding and abetting" these counterfeiting acts. These terms are particularly vague and they will hit technological suppliers, including the authors and publishers of Free Software. Threats of sanction and legal uncertainty that would result would further hinder innovation and drastically reduce the incentive to offer new products.

2. DRM, or digital cuffs, are officially "anti-copy" devices that aim at controlling access to digital work and to its use. For further information, refer to thenote on DRMs[8] published by April (in French).